Peacock

Two things came together recently and left me with a lovely peacock drawing.

First, Ben Kwok, on his Ornation Creation Facebook page, posted a line drawing of a peacock.
Second, clearing out some art drawers I discovered this very old watercolor and thought I should do something else with it (upcycle!)

I used the right side and traced the peacock template placing the eye in the white area. First I added some more color wash to zing it up. Here's the whole piece - and a detail - in the early stages.

Tangles thus far: Black Pearlz, Flying Geese, Opus with Aura, Tipple

I finished the tangling, added shading and some tiny gems for sparkle. It was pretty much finished when it caught my eye from across the room. There were things I didn't like. Mainly, it was too mid-tone, not enough good darks. I felt that either the tail or the oval shouldn't be there - but impossible to remove one of them! - so I needed to try to make them work together better.

Here's the final version, and a detail shot showing some of the bling in the blue background. I'm still not really satisfied with it. I don't seem to be able to get it as dark as I'd like in some places, and the oval and the tail are there to stay. You can tell from the detail shots that the color in the scans is inexact.

Tangles: Black Pearlz, Finery, Flying Geese, Jonqal, Khirkee, Opus, Sunflower (AM), Tipple,
and one I invented because I needed a pattern for the tail!

Reworked, reassembled, rejected, repurposed

I've been making ATCs from cut-up old artwork that was going nowhere and the results were pretty darn terrific in most cases! You can see some of them here and here. All the smaller pieces were quite lovely. The only 'problem' was that I no longer had the bigger artwork.

There was another piece that was stalled so I decided to cut it into squares, finish each small square individually, and reassemble it. Here it is cut into 16 squares. You can see some of the gray acrylic wash that I began with, when I expected the finished work would be black and white (and gray).

I added color to all the small squares. It was different from doing ATCs because on some there were large parts that needed to be left white. Here are all the little pieces with color. So far so good.

Then I reassembled the pieces. At this point I discovered a few places I had forgotten. I tangled those, added white ink in a few places, darkened some areas, and added shading in colored pencil.

It wasn't thrilling me. Maybe I had already done too much black and gray before I cut it in pieces. Maybe I should have stuck with black and white. Maybe the gray wash was too much right from the beginning. Maybe I had, in the back of my mind, the idea that it would get put together again. In any case, I wasn't pleased.

Sooo, to the rescue: Artist Trading Cards! I found some sections I did like and cut them to ATC size. I had eight and mounted them on backing paper because they were rather floppy. Then I tangled the white parts and fine-tuned things. These I'm quite pleased with.

So what gives? Why do these work as ATCs and not as a reassembled larger piece?

I did it again (ATCs)

More upcycled ATCs from a piece of unsatisfactory artwork. Fortunately I'm involved in two very large ATC exchanges, so I have lots of use for all the ATCs I've been making lately! For one swap I made 47 (I think) and for the next one I'm committed to 106! Yes, really!

I love fractals and encountered the Koch Snowflake design some time ago. It's composed of equilateral triangles and each triangle has a smaller triangle off the middle of each side. It continues like this, with smaller, tinier, ever more miniscule triangles. While the perimeter of the Koch Snowflake is fascinating, the middle is blaringly empty. Paradox (a favorite tangle) seemed like a marvelous thing to put inside the triangles. I didn't like the tiniest stars I could manage to draw; they seemed to make it look fuzzy.

Here's the original artwork, divided in pencil into ATC sizes. I saved the edges for potential bookmarks.

Thirteen cards to play with. Two have almost nothing on them.

Six of them received a background wash in various colors.

 

I also added collaged bits to some of those. Here are the above cards completed, and in the same order as above. Some I've decided I prefer 'upside-down'.

Five received initial collage elements of various sorts.

Here are the five above, now completed, and again in the same order. Little gems were added to the two on the right.

Two were left alone at the beginning but the one on the left got a bit of collage along the way. Finally, here are the last two.

Upcycled lacy ATCs

About three years ago I started this piece using an old handkerchief with hand-done, tatted lace edging. I had tangled on the fabric part and put tissue paper over top of that to mute it somewhat. I liked parts, but it wasn't really going anywhere.

I've been wanting to try doing some Artist Trading Cards with more materials than paper, pen and pencil so I thought, "Aha, I'll cut it up and go to town!" The border is mottled tan and brown and gold which doesn't show up very well. The little holes in the lace are quite a shiny gold, which also doesn't show up very well. Too bad.

The original, partially done artwork.

I measured and sliced and had 12 ATC-size cards ready to play with.

There were two with no lace. I used one of them immediately because I wanted to send an ATC on the theme of 'wings'. Here's that one. The hummingbird is from a magazine. I coated it, rubbed the paper off the back, and stuck it on the card.

Here are the four corners. They all have small round brads stuck through the cards. In the lower left card the brads are not the large brown 'pearls', those are ink; there are two smaller dull gold brads.

Next, some of the side pieces. Two have small brads. The colored one happened because I glued on a colored strip at the top and then tore off most of the tissue paper, leaving very clear brown tangling which I didn't really like.

And here are the last three. The third one has just a wee strip of the lace on the right edge. It was one of the 'waste' slices from cutting up the original large piece.

Eye candy! Zentangle ATC swap

(Warning: this post has a LOT of images!)

I signed up for an ATC (Artist Trading Card) swap a couple of months ago. It kept growing until finally there were 47 participants and I wanted to send a card to each one!

The theme or goal was to use black and one color as an accent. Some of my cards were rather heavily accented. :P
Sometimes I make ATCs when I have leftover bits of paper, so I had some already done that would qualify for this swap. A few others I adapted. Some are up cycled; more on that in my next post. Then I created more to fit the theme.

Here are many of them for you to enjoy before I put them in the mail. I'm not going to attempt to list all the tangles!

Some resemble temple roofs. These four all have tiny gems in the matching color.
Some are from a mandala that I up cycled.

Some resemble trees, especially with a blue background.

Some are mandala middles.

I made four cards similar to the one on the lower left.
They're from another piece of art that I up cycled.